Rigidity of critical circle mappings. I (Q1969506)

The authors consider the problem of smoothness of the conjugacy between two circle automorphisms without periodic points, each endowed with one critical point of the same polynomial type. In the first theorem, it is shown that exponential convergnece of these maps under renormalization implies that the conjugacy is \(C^{1+\alpha}\), \(\alpha> 0\), provided that the rotation type satisfies an arithmetic condition, weaker than bounded type. For rotation numbers of bounded type this fact had previously been known from a work by \textit{D. Rand} [Nonlinearity 1, 181-202 (1988; Zbl 0697.58029)]. In the second theorem, the authors show that for \(C^\infty\) maps the conjugacy in general cannot be smooth. This result is based on estimates near the saddle-node bifurcation and an original technique for perturbing the automorphism in order to preclude a smooth conjugacy. The perturbations used move dynamical partitions only up to a certain order and leave the first return mappigs unchanged on deeper levels.